Wednesday, September 28, 2011

I really hope this is a joke

It's too bad that Quote of the Week was yesterday, because this morning I stumbled across a doozy.

As a way to solve the national debt crisis, North Carolina Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue recommends suspending congressional elections for the next couple of years.

“I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover,” Perdue said at a rotary club event in Cary, N.C., according to the Raleigh News & Observer. “I really hope that someone can agree with me on that.”

Perdue said she thinks that temporarily halting elections would allow members of Congress to focus on the economy. “You have to have more ability from Congress, I think, to work together and to get over the partisan bickering and focus on fixing things,” Perdue said.

Um... yikes. Perdue's supporters are of course scrambling to suggest that her comments were meant in jest, but that sure doesn't sound to me like a comment where there's much room for interpretation.

To be fair, I can (sort of) understand where she might be coming from here. Far too many of our elected officials are too worried about pandering to their party and their base that they forget to govern, forget to lead. But removing accountability from the equation entirely is absolutely no panacea for what ails us. The fact is, accountability is the only thing that ensures that our elected officials are looking out for the interests of the citizenry--many politicians ignore that fact, and find themselves in trouble because of it.

Perdue's suggestion, ultimately, is that politicians would do what was right for the country, if only those pesky voters would get out of the way. I think that's distasteful, and it's very close to the same kind of self-justifying behavior that bankers so often display--"yes, we got you into this mess, but we're the only ones who can save you from the mess that we created". Oooooookay.

We've got problems, and those problems need to be solved and solved quickly. It violates basic logic to think that removing accountability would lead to better results--when in history has that ever been the case?